E-commerce: Taking Business to Customer Doorstep

Electronic commerce or E-commerce is type of commercial activity which is done electronically over the internet or through connected network of computers. The first step of e-commerce began with need for banks to integrate computers systems connected across branches spread in different territories to complete fund transfer, fund deposit and fund withdrawal requests.

………………..Read More About E-commerce: Taking Business to Customer Doorstep

Watch out Quick Review about Technologies for Ecommerce Website Development

This article is the extension of our Previous Article “Technologies for Ecommerce Website Development”. In last article we cover the

1. Magento: Popular for extensibility, development, management & consumer friendly options. It also support multi-store and multi-site functionality.

2. OpenCart: Popular for free design templates and plugins for advance functionality but not like a CMS.

Lets proceed with some more platforms for ecommerce development.

3. PrestaShop Ecommerce Application Development: It is an open source e-commerce web application that was launched in 2005. PrestaShop requires at least Apache web server 1.3, PHP 5, MySQL 5 and a Linux, Unix or Windows installed operating system. PrestaShop makes use of the well-known Smarty templating engine, and can handle multiple templates being installed at one time. PrestaShop has a better module folder structure than OpenCart. The common complaint with PrestaShop is lack of development documentation, though does seems to be improving with time.

4. Drupal Ecommerce Application Development: Even though it is not a specialist Ecommerce Platform, still it is quite popular because of its large community and vast array of extension. It is quite popular and have a major edge because of being a CMS instead of just an Ecommerce-system. The Ecommerce plugin enhances Ecommerce functionality of the Drupal CMS. Drupal can be trickier is in overriding core functionality. Often the only way to do so is to copy a core module, alter it, and make the same changes whenever updating in future.

Even though it has extensive and varied support communities to spend hours to look for help but Ecommerce is never a native functionality in Drupal. It comes as an Add-on which often posses traumatic situations while setting categories, products and related products.

5. osCommerce Ecommerce Application Development: “Open Source Commerce” is an e-commerce and online store- management software program. It is a most used platform despite history of poor security, difficult maintenance and spaghetti code. osCommerce is extremely poor when it comes to development. Almost all development work involves modifying core files, and those are largely procedural code. Where it does score well, however, it ubiquity of hosting.

Comparison Table

Ecommerce Comparison Table

Ref: http://www.addedbytes.com/blog/open-source-php-e-commerce-platforms/

Binary Semantics offers Software Development and IT Services to companies across the world. We posses experience in Software Development of more than 27yrs. for companies across various sectors. We are pioneer in Bespoke Application Development and have given Fleet Management and Automated Insurance Solution to Leading Automobile Manufactures in India.

Contact us for Ecommerce Application Development: marketing@binarysemantics.com

Or Visit us at: www.binarysemantics.com

Technologies for Ecommerce Website Development

Consumers are receptive to new things and like to experience it. In the process, when they receive an extra value they start accepting it into their daily life. Similar observation is seen in Online shopping trends in India. In a survey done by ASSOCHAM in 2011, it was found that about 40 per cent among those surveyed across cities like the aforesaid cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Bangalore, Kolkata, Ahmedabad, Chandigarh, Ludhiana, Lucknow and Jaipur said that they prefer to shop online. In fact this inclination among the youth is going to help the online retail industry to reach Rs 7,000 crore marks by 2015, ASSOCHAM predicts.

Amidst such observation, organizations with strong presence at their market place are getting resilient to such trends and putting a step forward to open up Ecommerce store to provide 24 X 7 shopping experience to consumers and customers. If as an organization you are also thinking to open up a new ecommerce store, we can provide you a quick guide about trending technologies and user expectations for a successful ecommerce website development.

ecommerce website

Technologies for Ecommerce Website Development:-

1. Magento

2. OpenCart

3. PrestaShop

4. Drupal

5. osCommerce

1. Magento Ecommerce Application Development: It is an open source e-commerce web application that was launched on March 31, 2008. The Magento ecommerce system has been widely adopted by online retailers with 150,000 sites known to use it ranging from smaller ecommerce websites to large multinational businesses such as Harvey Nichols and Samsung.

Magento Development involves several key coding practices like flexible product display options, mobile templates, transaction options, multi-store and multi-site functionality, user accounts and loyalty programs, product categorization and shopper filtering, and discount and promotion rules that make the system versatile and adaptable as an Magento e-commerce platform Development.

In relatively short time span, it has gained remarkable success and acceptability in developer’s community for ecommerce website development because of its extensibility, development, management and consumer friendly options.

2. OpenCart Ecommerce Application Development: If you want a speedy way to get started with ecommerce website online with easy to use code base, Open cart is certainly a good option. It is largely popular for Small Ecommerce startups to get online with full features ecommerce website in relatively lesser time and cost. It doesn’t give you a sound CMS with access to edit content, versioning of documents, publishing dates, commenting on posts and so on. You don’t even get CMS with basic blog functionality.

An important feature of OpenCart is largely the (by using a template engine) free design possibilities in design and functionality, and the ability of one or more of many modules (extra programs) in the software to implement.

………………to be continued

Watch out Quick Review about other technologies in our Next Article.

– Courtesy Binary Semantics

DOs and DON’Ts for Ecommerce Website Development and Marketing

In order to make your website productive, efficient and successfully, there always exists few important parameters that should and should not be done. There exist Dos and Don’ts for every stage of lifecycle of Ecommerce Website Development. Below are few of the listed Dos and Don’ts for Ecommerce Website Development:-

1. Do define the objective and goals clearly on a paper and Expected ROI.

2. Failing to Plan leads towards planning to fail: Do make a plan for Website Launch and Marketing. The first step is to prepare a daily, weekly and monthly plan and deadlines for the Development and Marketing.

3. Do spend time in defining the best user experience: You need to spend time to segregate what to be marketed on website? What are the highlights? Is the Navigation good enough for User? Does user is able to find the desired object easily? Does the cart is lost if any wrong button is pressed? Discuss with your friends, subordinates in testing period. Ask people and do survey to find what they seek on home page and landing pages.

4. The shopping should easy and safe for the end User: You should ensure safety in purchasing process on online medium. There should be zero probability in security breach. You may go for Verisign for Online transactions.

ecommerce website

5. You never get a second chance to make first impression: Don’t make your home page chaotic for the end user. The interface should have a very good look and feel so that your first impression leaves good remarks for your portal.

6. Limit the Level of Website: Don’t make user to dig into the pages to 3rd and 4th level to find product for him. If your website requires digging to search products, eventually the product will always lie buried inside your website. Any product listed down to increasing number of levels, it eventually gets dead and hardly any user will visit that page. It’s better to limit the levels of digging.

7. Do mention Terms and Conditions clearly: You should not conceal anything from the user to build and maintain the trust of the end user.

8. Make it for the Users, Not just for the Search Engines: It’s good to optimize your website with quality title and Meta tags. But limit it to that extent only. You should focus the end user and don’t allow too much text for the customer to read. Do provide links for T&C and Privacy policy, but your landing page must speak through quality images and interface.

9. Do provide the contact information for necessary feedback for your ecommerce website.

Does your business require E Commerce Website

We are witnessing a paradigm shift for offline to online shopping. With consumer demand and convenience, companies are focusing to provide niche ecommerce platform for marketing ad selling perspective. Before going for an Ecommerce Application Development and Custom Software Application, we may find alternative and substitute options for marketing and selling products “Online”.

Following things should be considered before going launching Ecommerce:-

1. Ecommerce for Name Sake: You can invest and just for name sake you want to launch the Ecommerce Website will not help you that much, rather, if not updated regularly, and poor website aesthetics may give negative impact on market!!
2. Selective Products and Services: There is no harm in having Ecommerce Platform to start with rare business leads that can come online. You need to figure out what Products and Services you are sure to deliver. A Dynamic Ecommerce Website with intelligent business rules is much better option to maintain inventory and represent exact availability of Products.
3. Service Provider V/s Product Manufacturer: No matter what product business you do, there are Ecommerce applications and portal for everything now. But you need to figure out if you provide both Services and Product, how to manage in admin panel. An experienced professional is must for conceptualizing and developing the same to manage all the sales activities hassle free.
4. Affiliate marketing: If your business is very small and don’t want to bear website development and maintenance cost, you may feature your products on affiliate marketing website. Naaptol.com, ebay.in and Junglee.com are such websites that provides you a platform that showcase and sell your product.
5. B2B Ecommerce transactions: Third Party Payment Gateway charges some percentage of transaction as transactional fee. One needs to adjust pricing and margins accordingly before depicting on website. B2B Sellers should provide Ecommerce Section in website for Bulk order as per business needs.
Binary Semantics Limited is an offshore development and a software services company incorporated in New Delhi. We have been providing Application Development & Management Services, e-commerce solutions
, Digital Content Solution, BPO and Professional Consulting services in the North American market since 1996.

We have been delivering services ranging from maintenance of existing applications to full life-cycle ecommerce web development of enterprise-wide business applications to the satisfaction of our customers competitively. Our proven and customizable Global Delivery Framework- Offshoring™ and ISO 9001:2008 certified processes ensure consistency and high quality of deliverables.